Ross McKitrick, Professor of Economics at the University of Guelph in Canada, although not a climate scientist, has still, because of his mathematical competency, contributed a considerable amount to critical awareness of the limitations of present climate science. For example, he teamed up with Stephen McIntyre, a mathematician, and they began an examination of the UN IPCC materials, the statistical analysis of which they did not find very sophisticated, or sound.
In particular, they examined the data on which University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann et al. created his hockey stick graph, allegedly showing a steep rise in temperatures on Earth in the second half of the 20th century. In their opinion there were substantial statistical errors in this hypothesis, and a selective use of data. The hockey stick issue came up in a recent Washington DC court case, where Mann sued two journalists for defamation, but the issue of the truth or otherwise of the hockey stick graph was not a decisive issue in the case, which related to personal judgments.
Professor McKitrick has also been critical of the UN's view that there is a climate catastrophe, showing that its own climate change watchdog, the IPCC does not produce objective data to support this. Consequently, it is absurd for the West to adopt radical environmentalist policies based around renewables. He has made the common-sense argument that renewables such as wind and solar are simply too unreliable for advanced industrial countries to rely upon. Given that the climate change extremist position is, if he is correct, false, it follows that fossil fuels should not be abandoned, even with the nuclear option, which could be a supplement for security. Peter Dutton needs to bring Professor McKitrick onto the Australian liberal think tank, if it can be called that.
"While there is a lot of talk about renewables being cheap, Ross McKitrick, Professor of Economics at the University of Guelph in Canada, gives a simple example of why this is not true. He draws a parallel with the building of railways. Suppose, for example, that a country wants to build a railroad from one end of the country to the other, and puts out a tender. Two bids are received, one of which is significantly cheaper than the other. However, the company that submitted the cheaper bid says that after every 10 miles, there is a three mile gap in the track. If such a condition is acceptable, the price is really cheap. "Well, obviously, the fact that it's cheaper doesn't help, because it's now useless as a railroad. And electricity systems that are running on wind are useless for the same purpose. You can't have an electricity system that when the wind dies down, there's no electricity," he says. The same kind of problems are true for solar power as well.
The energy system must be reliable
To make the power system work, i.e., to have electricity available all the time with renewables, you need either energy storage capacity or some kind of parallel system of generation. As far as storage is concerned, there are no good solutions at the moment, says McKitrick. One option, he notes, would be to try to create a lake in the sky and pump enough water up there while the weather is windy to use it as a hydro resource in the absence of wind. However, this is not a realistic solution. Another option would be batteries. "No one can even conceive today of how you'd have batteries large enough to run an entire country for anything more than 30 seconds or so," he says.
And the third option? In order to have a sufficient and continuous supply of electricity, we would need another more reliable source than wind and solar – gas-fired power plants, for example. In other words, you will need to add this cost and essentially build duplicate electricity systems that run at the same time. McKitrick says this is inefficient, silly, and comes with a high cost. "Anything that people talk about is so incredibly expensive that suddenly the cost comparison goes back to where it always was, which is fossil fuel-based systems are inexpensive and 100% reliable," he says. Nuclear, he adds, is expensive by comparison, but once it is built, the costs of running it are low and it lasts a long time. Hydropower is also good and reliable, but it can only be used where natural conditions are right. "We've used them because they're the ones that work. And when you factor in the reliability, they're also the least expensive overall. Wind and solar, they will never be competitive because of the intermittency," says McKitrick.
Depending on the taxpayer
Since renewables are uncompetitive, governments subsidise them, or in other words, taxpayers pay for them, everywhere. McKitrick gives the example of his home province of Ontario, Canada. Around the mid-2000s, Ontario decided to start heavily subsidising wind farm development. "What they sold to the public was Ontario is now going to be a world leader in manufacturing wind turbines and everybody is going to be lining up to buy wind turbines from us. So there will be a great economic benefit," McKitrick recalls but adds that nothing of the sort happened. "No, we didn't have any comparative advantage in building wind turbines. We don't have a wind turbine industry in Ontario. We ended up importing all the parts. The turbines went up and the Government changed and the subsidies disappeared. The whole industry disappeared," McKitrick explains. According to him, this is what always happens when an industry comes into existence not because private investors have an interest in developing it, but because the Government is handing out taxpayer money to it. "It's gone as soon as the subsidies are gone. And as long as the subsidies are in place, it's a drain on your society. It is destroying your national wealth, not building it," he says.
The energy transition and the deployment of renewable energy is only one part of the climate debate, however. The transition to a decarbonised economy should be preceded by the question of why we are doing it in the first place. Allegedly, it is because human-emitted CO2 has caused global warming and if we do not stop it, if we continue to emit CO2, we will end up with a climate catastrophe, full of hellfire and extreme weather events. But in reality, we should be asking, are these claims really accurate?